Socialist Workers Party builds
March 10 public meeting in NY
(front page)

BY JOHN STUDER
As the world crisis of capitalist production and trade bears down more and more sharply on workers and farmers, the bosses and their government continue their relentless assault. Workers are conducting hard-fought battles against lockouts and other attacks, from American Crystal in the Red River Valley to Cooper Tire in Ohio, reaching out and winning needed solidarity and support.

In every such fight, resistance to the bosses’ assaults runs up against the fact that behind them stands their class rule through the capitalist state and ownership of the factories, mines, banks, and means of transport and trade. Solidarity and militancy, the essential starting point of all working-class struggle, cannot by themselves crack this dictatorship of capital.

The contradictions arising out of differing responses to this fact of the class struggle—not only among working people, but various middle class currents that claim to speak for workers’ interests—pose alternative political courses.

Against this backdrop, the Socialist Workers Party has called a national public meeting March 10. The doors will open at 2 p.m. at the Armenian Ballroom, 630 Second Avenue (at 35th St.), in New York City. The program will be followed by discussion, dinner and a social.

Among the speakers will be Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party and Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the SWP National Committee and editor of Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution, newly published by Pathfinder Press.

Leading into the March 10 meeting, SWP members and young socialists have been joining with others in solidarity activities to strengthen workers resistance and seeking to expand the long-term readership of the Militant.

In the Midwest, the party is moving to launch the first of what will be dozens of 2012 SWP election campaigns that present an alternative of independent working-class political action. Campaign supporters explain the need to build a revolutionary working-class movement able to lead the fight for political power.

Other political forces in the workers movement and various middle class currents counterpose one variant or another of liberalism and class collaboration that accepts capitalist rule. Over the past year, some have been attracted to the so-called Occupy movement, with its depiction of a world divided between “the 1 percent” of the rich and “the 99 percent” of all the rest. But the multi-millioned legions who serve, supervise, and apologize on behalf the employing class—from the government bureaucracy, universities and think tanks, and non-governmental organizations, to cops, the army brass, and “officers of the courts” of every variety—play an integral role in maintaining the capitalist system.

The view of the “Occupiers” leads to political subordination to to the class enemy, toward support for Obama in 2012 and the capitalist two-party system.

Today’s massive unemployment on which the functioning of the capitalist system depends, especially in times of crisis, falls hardest on workers who are African American. The fact that Blacks remain an oppressed nationality—disproportionately proletarian relative to other layers of the population—reinforces this superexploitation.

The evidence? Look no farther than the enormous increase in the incarceration of workers, at an appalling multiple for those who are Black, and the ‘stop and frisk’ and cop brutality tied to it.

That a much larger layer of Blacks than ever before in history are integrated into the rulers’ board rooms and political parties—including the White House today—doesn’t counter this reality of the working class in the United States.

Today’s capitalist crisis and toilers’ resistance in face of it are both global in reach. Working people and youth in Greece, Egypt, Syria, Iran, China, and elsewhere are seeking effective ways to resist tyranny and fight the exploiters’ economic attacks.

And the lessons of workers’ struggles, too, are global. Leading up to and since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, its leadership has advanced the involvement of working people in every aspect of taking their destiny into their own hands. They set an example for workers in the U.S. and. That example is central to the new Pathfinder book The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution—which Mary-Alice Waters participated in launching at the Havana International Book Fair just weeks before the New York meeting at which she will speak.

On Sunday morning, March 11 a meeting will be organized for people interested in the communist movement and who want to discuss Saturday’s talks further.

Also on Sunday organized supporters of the SWP will discuss their work in the Print Project, keeping Pathfinder Press titles in print. They will discuss expanding the Supporters Monthly Appeal, which raises financial contributions for party work.

From March 12-14 the SWP National Committee will meet on plans for the party convention, set for June. The leadership meeting will prepare to kick off the SWP 2012 presidential campaign and an ambitious Militant subscription drive.

For more information on the weekend’s activities, contact the New York Socialist Workers Party, which is hosting the meeting, or local distributors of the Militant in your area, listed on page 8.